Museums: a wholesome recreational alternative to procreation and the pub*

The Attic (a name which commemorates our first physical location) is, first and foremost, a site for the research students of the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester: a virtual community which aims to include all students, be they campus-based and full-time, or distance-learning and overseas. But we welcome contributions from students of museum studies - and allied subject areas - from outside the School and from around the world. Here you will find a lot of serious stuff, like exhibition and research seminar reviews, conference alerts and calls for papers, but there's also some 'fluff'; the things that inspire, distract and keep us going. After all, while we may be dead serious academic types, we're human too.

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Imagined Lives at the National Portrait Gallery

Julian Fellowes, Alexander McCall Smith, Tracy Chevalier, Joanna Trollope and Terry Pratchett are among the authors who have created imaginary biographies to accompany the works.

The gallery has a number of paintings which were purchased in the 19th and 20th centuries in the belief that they represented famous people, only for the identities of the sitters to be disproved or disputed.

A painting known as False Mary, painted in 1570 and once thought to be a portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots, captured the imagination of McCall Smith. He has written a story identifying her as a body double for the Queen.

For further information from the National Portrait Gallery itself, click here.

***STOP PRESS***

Museums (em)Power PhD Conference

We have a new PhD conference upcoming this year September 13-14, 2018. It is called Museums (em)Power and will thematically explore power from a contemporary, museum context. The official website and details are forthcoming. Stay tuned to the Attic Blog for the latest!